


you can seize the night but you can't steal knowledge

by congratsyouvegrownasoul



Category: 18th & 19th Century CE RPF, 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, The Dreamer (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Yale Bros, things I thought about writing this, what Hogwarts house is Nathan in?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-24 11:20:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4917592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/congratsyouvegrownasoul/pseuds/congratsyouvegrownasoul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s a secret society,” Nathan says, a hint of pride entering his voice. “It’s like something out of a story book—like Camelot, or the Templars.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can seize the night but you can't steal knowledge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the42towels](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the42towels/gifts).



> Happy birthday to one of my favorite people. A blast from the past starring the one who brought us together in the first place. What better gift for a fellow historian and friend than a snapshot of historical friends?
> 
> I hope you like it, and to anyone who stumbles across this rather niche work: welcome, and enjoy. 
> 
> I suppose this could be interpreted as Dreamer!verse, history!verse, or alternate!verse with my as-yet-unpublished time travel story.

October nights are beautiful, clear and clean and crisp, with just a few ethereal strands of cloud and fog drifting across the stars. The roots of winter chill seep into the air, and bright leaves crunch underfoot, blood-red, copper, yellow as a memory of summer sun. At least, October nights in the Colony of Connecticut, where Nathan Hale has lived all fourteen years of his life.

Tonight, Nathan can hear the subtle sounds of the slumbering city around him, New Haven creaking and shifting in the midnight hour. Yale’s campus, however, is nearly silent, an empty, dark-shrouded square. Only the ghostly smoke trickling from chimneys on the edges hint at the students and professors tucked away in dormitory beds.

Nathan, on the other hand, is outside, out of bounds, waiting with his chilly hands wedged in the pockets of his cloak, wishing he had a candle to light the way and knowing instead he has a secret to keep.

A soft but piercing whistle cuts the heavy quiet, a scrap from a jaunty tavern air. Nathan smiles to himself and purses his lips to echo the tune. He pushes back his hood to bare his sandy-haired head, pale against the night.

His comrade crosses the gap between two buildings quickly. Beneath a thick knit cap, Benjamin Tallmadge’s face comes into view, with its familiar sharp nose and unruly locks of dark hair.

Nathan clasps his best friend’s forearm, grinning broadly. Ben moves to embrace him, but Nathan steps aside hastily.

“No, wait, you’ll crush Min,” he whispers, gesturing at the linen sling hanging over his chest.

“You brought her?” Ben asks incredulously.

“Shh! Of course I did. You’re meant to be kept warm if you’ve got a cold, so I’ve been wearing her under my cloak and I put her basket near the fire.”

He reaches into the cloth sack, gently ruffling the ears of a half-grown tabby kitten, which almost immediately lets out a muffled sneeze, as if to prove her illness is genuine.

“I can’t believe you,” Ben says, half fond and half exasperated.

“She needs me to watch her!”

“Oh, surely, she does, but I didn’t think I’d be embarking on an illicit night raid with a bloody cat! Perfect!”

They both laugh softly.

“Thank you for agreeing to go with me,” Nathan says, smiling at his friend in gratitude.

“What else was I going to do? Pass up an adventure? Force you to drag Enoch out of bed at this unholy hour?”

“Enoch can’t go anyhow, since we’re both trying to join. He has his trial next. We’re not meant to talk about it with each other.”

“Trials,” Ben scoffs. “You’d think it was a spy ring, not a debate club.”

“It’s a secret society,” Nathan says, a hint of pride entering his voice. “It’s like something out of a story book—like Camelot, or the Templars.”

“Lead on then, Sir Galahad,” Ben laughs.

They sneak across the college green, across cobblestone pathways, giggling nervously to themselves and glancing intermittently over their shoulders, enjoying the novelty of creeping through the dark.

Wrapped against Nathan’s chest, Minerva squirms, mewing. He strokes her soft fur, humming under his breath to soothe her.

The little raiding party comes to a halt outside of a hulking academic building, the red brick of its walls muted in the looming gloom.

“How do we get in?” Ben hisses.

“They left a window open for me, Hezekiah said. Come on, Ben, let’s look.”

Nathan remembers the older boy, president of the Linonia Society, who had cornered him after his Greek class and dispensed his task.

_Get into the library. ‘Borrow’ a book._

Hezekiah had tipped him an exaggerated wink at that.

_Then get out. That’s the easy part._

_Tomorrow you’ll read from your choice and we’ll discuss on it. Choose wisely._

Nathan and Ben circle the building, trying to discern which window does not reflect the moonlight. Finally, Nathan spots it—one gap is darker than the rest, on the second floor.

“Here,” he calls. “We’ll have to climb, I suppose.”

Ben eyes the nubbins of brick poking out of the wall, and the scattered tendrils of ivy.

“That doesn’t look promising.”

He glances over, sizing up Nathan’s build, taller and broader-shouldered than his own.

“You might lift me.”

Nathan shrugs.

“I might.”

He kneels down on the ground, flinching slightly as, with pressure, the cold suffuses through his breeches. Untying Minerva’s sling, he removes his cloak as well, wadding it up on the ground to further cushion his cat from the chilly cobblestones.

He squares himself, breathing deeply. The night air is bracing.

“I’m ready.”

Ben crawls up onto his back, shins resting on Nathan’s shoulders. Slowly, Nathan stands, feeling his friend’s elbows pinioning the sides of his skull as he rises. He takes a few tottering steps forward, and, glancing up carefully, sees Ben place the palms of his hands flat against the building's brick façade.

Above him, Ben also scrambles to a standing position, his feet curling around onto Nathan’s chest. He half-steps, half-hoists himself into the window, lifting his weight off of Nathan’s shoulders foot by foot.

Ben perches there on the windowsill for a moment, grinning, his teeth shockingly white in the darkness.

“Pass up the cat, why don’t you?”

Min squeaks a little as she is lifted, suspended and swaying in her sling, but Ben soon cradles her to his own chest, then gently puts her down inside.

Leaning off the edge, he stretches his arms down to Nathan.

“I suppose you shall have to jump a bit. I’ll pull you up.”

Nathan has to practically throw himself up and into the wall, reaching for Ben’s hands. He slides and scrapes against the brick, scrabbling for purchase, feeling rather like an ungainly squirrel, but eventually Ben hauls him inside.

The window opens onto a narrow hallway, lined with somewhat threadbare carpet. Half out of her wrappings, Min paws curiously at a loose unraveling of yarn. Nathan is pleased to see her looking bright-eyed and far less sickly than earlier in the day. He scoops her back up, tucking her in carefully so she can still poke her head out.

Ben is trotting ahead, picking his way down the corridor. There are about a half-dozen doors—bedrooms, Nathan assumes, never having been upstairs in this particular building. He’s had no cause to visit the accommodations, just the library and classrooms on the ground floor.

“Ben,” he calls softly. “We need to find stairs.”

“Not too hard. Look,” Ben points.

One of the doors on the opposite end is ajar slightly, and when Nathan hurries to his friend’s side, he can see a narrow, shadowy staircase stretching down. The hinges creaks a little when they’re eased open, and Nathan glances around, anxious, but no one stirs from the other doors.

They trip down the stars in the dark, coming thumping up against the bottom door. Nathan gropes for the doorknob, and they practically fall into the downstairs side hall.

Hangings spread over the whitewashed walls: elaborate maps of Connecticut Colony and the city of London, a print of the Roman Forum, star-charts. Nathan and Ben walk past ruins and constellations until they halt before the double oak doors of the Yale Library, their final destination.

For a moment, Nathan fears that this door, like the one to the outside, will be locked, and their journey will be for naught, but the doors are freed easily, though they are cumbersome.

In the library, with the door shut and heavy curtains sealing off the frosted windows, the boys for the first time can light candles. Nathan fishes a match from his cloak pocket and strikes it against an end table, lighting two small candlesticks. He leaves one on the table and passes the other to Ben.

“Hold this while I look for a suitable book, all right?”

“Of course.”

First, though, he puts Minerva down. Her squirming has reached an intolerable level, and she seems happy to be on firm ground, wriggling quickly out of her cloth and padding after Nathan.

He scans the bookshelves, marveling at all his options. Heavy encyclopedic tomes bound in rich red leather—shelves of papery preacher’s pamphlets—Caesar and Cicero and Shakespeare and Swift— _Fisheries of the New World_ and _On Anglish Buterrflyes_.

In his family’s home, there were three shelves laden with books, mainly Bibles and almanacs, but others as well, enough that he counted himself lucky. He had had his schoolbooks too, in the bedroom he shared with two brothers. He had borrowed books from the minister and the barrister, anything he could get his hands on, really.

This wealth of knowledge, however, is something he’d only ever dreamed of. When he’d first walked into the Yale library, he’d caught his breath in shock and awe. Now, once more, he is astounded. He could almost just stand and stare, breathing in the smell of ink and dust.

But he runs from shelf to shelf, grazing stiff spines with his fingertips, stooping down to see the bottom row’s forgotten cargo. Occasionally he pulls out a new find, hefting its weight in his hands, flipping through the pages looking for some choice passage to spark a debate. There is so much that Nathan finds himself quite overwhelmed and sinks to the floor, holding a volume of sonnets and sestinas open in his lap, gazing at the walls of books.

After a minute, the sudden flick of Min’s tail on his left wrist calls him from his reverie, and he glances down to see his cat on his lap, lying across the edge of the book. He smiles as she entwines her tail around his fingers, then gasps in horror when he realizes she is holding the page corner in her mouth and tugging at it.

“Minerva, no!” Nathan yelps urgently, pulling her away as quickly yet gently as he is able.

Still holding the kitten at arm’s length, he examines the damage. There are marks from her sharp little teeth, mostly mere dents but one small hole pierced straight through, and the paper is damp.

Hovering over his shoulder now, Ben laughs ruefully.

“When you named her I imagine you thought she’d read with you, not eat the books!”

Nathan laughs too, albeit shakily. He sets his cat aside and replaces the poetry book, smoothing down the crumpled corner as a knot of guilt settles in his stomach.

“I probably shouldn’t have brought her.”

“Probably not.”

He sighs heavily.

“I probably shouldn’t have agreed to do this.”

Ben cocks his head.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think I can do it. Steal a book, I mean. Look at all this.”

He gestures expansively at the library around them. The exhilaration he felt creeping across the courtyard has faded. Here, in this calm surround of knowledge, only confusion and weariness remain.

“It’s just marvelous here. I couldn’t bring myself to take something. They belong here. And Min and I have already damaged one…what if I dropped it in mud, or Min ate it in the middle of the night, or I lost it?”

Nathan swallows, feeling foolish.

“I can’t. They belong here,” he ends lamely.

He expects Ben to laugh at him, or scold him for dragging them both out of bed and to the library for nothing, for ruining their midnight adventure. But the other boy just stares at him, the expression in his dark eyes inscrutable.

“All right,” he says. “Get your cat and let’s go home.”

The doors feel heavier this time, when they pry them open.

Ben stops suddenly.

“What will you tell the Linonians? Will you still go to the meeting?”

Nathan glances away, dejected.

“I don’t know. I just know I can’t do it.”

He pauses in the library threshold, brow creasing in sudden thought.

“Wait. I’ve an idea.”

* * *

 The next evening, just as the sun is gliding down into the dark and the October shadows are starting to trickle in, a dozen young men meet in an abandoned Yale classroom.

The youngest of the lot stands at the head of the room, where a professor might. His arms are stiff behind his back, one hand clutching the other wrist tightly, and his knees are locked, as if to hold himself steady in place. But he holds his head high, and his eyes are bright and clear.

The denizens of the Linonia Society wait in anticipation, wondering if their new recruit will prove himself or, instead, blunder. Nathan, on trial, clears his throat, forces a smile, and begins.

“As you may see, I’ve not brought a book. I found the open window and I went to the library. I looked all around, and I saw plenty of things I could debate on. But there was nothing I wanted to discuss so much that I was willing to rob the Yale library for it.”

Sprawled at a desk, Hezekiah raises his eyebrows, bewildered. Nathan steels himself and plows on.

“There is a pamphlet on the third shelf, in Row B. It’s a sermon by the Reverend Increase Mather. It is about original sin. I am not exceptionally interested in the topic, but the sermon is quite short. So I studied it, and I know it now by heart.”

He closes his eyes, picturing the yellowed page of the old pamphlet in front of him, and begins to recite.

When he opens his eyes again, the other boys are all stony-faced and silent. Hezekiah is sitting upright, elbows propped on his desktop.

Nathan can feel his heart hammering in his throat now that all his words have fled. He has stunned them all, as he expected, and perhaps shamed them, as a part of him had hoped, and now he has no idea what to do. He begins to question himself…perhaps he was too harsh, perhaps he is too idealistic.

There is an interminable pause, and then Hezekiah leans forward on his elbows, head in his hands, and starts to laugh. After a moment, some of the others join in.

Nathan flinches, confused, anxious that they mock his earnestness.

Eventually, Hezekiah’s shoulders stop shaking and he glances up at Nathan, face pink from laughter.

“Impressive.”

“Very impressive,” another older boy echoes.

“You’ve a lot of nerve.”

The comment is said in admiration, not chastisement. Nathan finds himself smiling, a true smile this time, though his head is still whirling.

He realizes that he, in turn, is impressed that they do not reject his rejection out of hand. Whatever comes of this, he’s earned a modicum of their respect, and, despite his ethical dilemma, they’ve retained some of his.

Hezekiah stands up, strides to the front of the room, and stands beside Nathan, facing him.

"You’ve a fair point, and clearly a fair mind as well as a sharp one. You may not be much interested in original sin, but I’m sure our future debates will give you more pleasure.”

Nathan steps back, finding himself stunned all over again.

“Really? You’re letting me in?”

“I think you’ll be a good fit. What better than a man who’ll debate us on the ethics of our own rules?”

Nathan nods, disbelieving yet rejoicing.

“Just a few questions, though: if we discuss Mather, will you still be able to debate on the subject without a hard copy?”

He grins broadly.

“And when do I learn the secret handshake?”


End file.
